Empowerment: the capacity of individuals, groups and/or communities to take control of their circumstances, exercise power and achieve their own goals, and the process by which, individually and collectively, they can help themselves and others to maximize the quality of their lives. (Robert Adams, Wikipedia)
In the last chapter of this story, I referred to the Coalition of Community Gardens in Tampa Florida (USA). True, gardening is the goal of this organization, but empowerment is its true purpose. The Coalition was born from a group discussion in August 2015. The Coalition's purpose is to provide the hard and soft infrastructure for community gardens and to build healthy communities through gardening. The budding organization spotted an opportunity early on to really grow and blossom (pardon the puns) with, of all things, a challenge. This chapter is a short story about that challenge and how it empowered our members and communities to accomplish amazing things.
In 2016, the Aetna Foundation, the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the National Association of Counties (NACo) launched the Healthiest Cities & Counties Challenge Grant (www.healthiestcities.org) across the United States. Sadly, there are many people who do not have equal access to the goods and services that support good health. This could be access to fresh produce, health education, health services, recreation and open space, clean air, to name a few examples. The Challenge Grant would be awarded to cities and counties that could show that they would build broad-based groups of people across many different walks of life to develop and carry out strategies that create improvements in health equity and health outcomes; strategies that could be supported and measured.
Our Coalition of Community Gardens thought this grant could help our work. We approached the Hillsborough County (Florida) Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) to use their professional capacity to apply for this challenge since we knew community and transportation planning and health have a long association. Urban planning and public health are interconnected fields of study, with common goals of eliminating poverty and decreasing infectious diseases in cities back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is interesting to note that many people affected by health inequities understand intuitively the link between planning and public health and the lack of coordination and work between these professions that affect the quality of their lives.
The Hillsborough Transportation Planning Organization partnered with the Coalition of Community Gardens and brought other groups to the table too including the City of Tampa Economic Development Department, Transportation Department, Parks Department, the Florida Department of Health (Hillsborough County), Hillsborough Area Regional Transit and, of course, neighborhood groups and residents in the city of Tampa.
The program and projects developed for the grant application was named “Garden Steps.” The Garden Steps application identified a straightforward purpose: to create community gardens with easy pedestrian and bicycle access in identified “food deserts.” Wikipedia identifies a food desert as "an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food, in contrast with an area with higher access to supermarkets or vegetable shops with fresh foods, which is called a food oasis." The US Department of Agriculture definition of a food desert is an area that lacks a grocery store. A food desert can also be defined as an area where residents lack the financial capabilities to purchase healthy food because the stores in the area are overpriced or do not stock healthy food choices. Unfortunately, many inner cities in the larger US cities are food deserts.
We all understood that increasing access and availability to fresh fruits and vegetables for the people living in food deserts will improve the overall health of the population living there and improve overall health equity measures. The Healthiest Cities & Counties Challenge Grant program thought so too and awarded a $10,000 grant in start-up money to fund the Garden Steps program.
Early on, the Steering Committee for Garden Steps (the Coalition of Community Gardens is a member) asked for detailed information about the state of health in the city of Tampa. This led to the creation of the Hillsborough County Health Atlas. It provides a baseline profile of chronic disease, demographic, transportation, emergency preparedness and environmental factors that contribute to the overall public health of a community. This information was overlaid onto maps and made readily available on-line. (https://planhillsborough.org/health-atlas/)
The results of this work were startling. Many residents in food deserts face high rates of diabetes, obesity, asthma, lack of leisure time activity and poor physical and mental health. The Atlas also provides transportation data such as sidewalk coverage, bus routes and crashes of bicyclists and pedestrians. Areas identified as food deserts typically lacked sidewalks and had higher rates of bicycle and pedestrian accidents. Neighborhood socioeconomic data has been mapped too and can be viewed and overlaid with information for several other risk factors.
The Garden Steps team was active in many different outreach activities to educate and build community capacity. As part of the Garden Steps team, the Coalition of Community Gardens worked with community partner Senior Connections and provided cooking demonstrations and taste-tests of fresh vegetables at two (2) senior centers where thirty-five (35) participants are learning Diabetes Self-Management. The Project Manager shared some of the participants' comments- "Beets can be tasty prepared as we were shown. Cauliflower also." "Helpful to learn the manner that vegetables were prepared." We were encouraged by the Project Manager's comment to us as well: “Continue to share your love of gardening and growing fresh vegetables in our community. You are making a difference!”
When the Aetna Foundation needed a short video story for their annual conference the Coalition was quick to bring together community gardeners, both children and adults, and supporters to help the Garden Steps team create one. To encourage the sustainability and formation of community gardens, the Garden Steps team sponsored the first annual Grow Community Gardens – Tampa Bay Conference with 120 attendees participating.
The Garden Steps team went further and installed two pop up gardens with the strong capacity of community volunteers. The City of Tampa Transportation Department designed and built a pedestrian wayfinding pilot project to a community garden which was a first in Tampa. These are but a few of the many projects the Coalition of Community Gardens, as a member of the Garden Steps team, helped to implement.
In 2019, the Garden Steps program placed as first runner up in the Healthiest Cities and Counties Challenge, a national program, and our program was awarded $50,000. The Hillsborough Transportation Planning Organization's created and approved an action plan in 2020 and the Coalition for Community Gardens continues in the forefront today with other partners to implement the goal of better health through community gardening.
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Next week - Community Gardens - For Your Health, Your Community, The Planet - Here We Grow Again
This is one part of a multi-part story. To view past installments and other stories, please visit our blog, Learn-Engage-Empower at im4u.world and subscribe to get the stories delivered weekly to your inbox.
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